Contents

Cover

The Horus Heresy: Traitorous Scions – Extract

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

‘I am in blood. Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more,

Returning were as tedious as go o’er.’

– attributed to the Nameless Thane of Old Albia

The flagship was trying to kill them. There could be no other explanation.

Blearily, Lotara eyed the canteen that rested upon the arm of her command throne, thirst making her tongue fat and heavy in her mouth. She shook the tiny silver pillbox in her hand absently, and her last few analgesic tabs rattled within it. Her headache was a sharp, grinding reminder that she hadn’t taken any liquid in nearly two days.

And, of course, she had nothing to wash the painkillers down.

The Conqueror was surely trying to kill them.

Her ship. Angron’s ship.

Angron’s prison.

Her first officer circled around behind the raised dais. Where once Ivar Tobin had been a model example of the Legions’ naval officer class, now he would regularly pace the deck with the nervous agitation of an addict, his brow dull with dry, cold sweat.

He halted abruptly, covering his earpiece with one hand. ‘The door is sealed from the inside, ma’am. They are sending for a cutter. Still no contact with Mistress Andrasta, or her attendants.’

Lotara frowned. Her thoughts continued to drift.

The bridge space felt stiflingly warm, though that was likely just another effect of the dehydration. The crew preferred to keep the lighting low, because the lumen sconces had begun to flicker randomly and buzz like angry hornets, and even the most void-seasoned among them could not last a whole watch without suffering migraines or waking nightmares. Lotara herself had ordered the air cycler vents blocked up, in an effort to keep out the slaughterhouse reek that clung to every fibre of their uniforms. In a space designed for three hundred souls and more, barely sixty had reported for duty that night, and many of them were red-eyed and stripped down to their stained fatigues. A few were sprawled at their posts, sleeping fitfully.

There was little she could do about that, beyond hauling them down to the brig one by one with her own two weary hands, and hammering on the doors of every bunkroom to find suitable replacements. All of her slavers – no, discipline masters, she corrected herself – were engaged elsewhere on the ship. The Conqueror had to keep moving, and her engines were thirstier even than her crew.

Tobin straightened, staring blankly past his commanding officer like a grimy parade-ground recruit. It was his new way of reminding her of her duty, her superior rank, without actually saying a word, and it irritated her immensely.

‘Ma’am… You might ask the good captain to intervene,’ he offered. ‘Send a legionary or two down to the Navigator’s chambers, perhaps? We’re losing pace with the Trisagion and the rest of the Word Bearers fleet, and Lord Aurelian’s patience is not without its limits.’ Tobin paused just long enough to make it seem as though he might be waiting for an answer, then addressed the warrior directly. ‘My lord, what say you?’

Khârn was the only legionary on the bridge, though that was nothing unusual. He stood, as he so often did, in the open space to the left of the dais, swaying slightly and pressing at his temples with raw knuckles. Lotara knew that his headaches were far more fierce than hers could ever be, worse still when they sailed the tides of the warp as the fleet did now, and nothing whatsoever to do with the amount of water in his bloodstream. She didn’t remember him coming through the main doors, but he’d clearly been in the process of shedding his battleplate when the pain had driven him to start roaming the corridors of the flagship once again. The warrior’s left arm was bare, and his right gauntlet hung from his belt.

He murmured a reply from between clenched teeth. He did not open his eyes, nor turn to face them, but continued to knead his scalp.

Tobin raised an eyebrow. ‘My lord?’

‘They called my father the Lord of the Red Sands…’ he repeated, more loudly. A spasm flickered in his bicep, the outward sign of some deeper neural twitch.

Lotara glared at him. She attempted to swallow three times before she could actually manage to croak a reply.

‘We all did.’

She rarely bothered to address him by name or rank any more. He didn’t seem to notice.

‘He was the Undefeated,’ Khârn continued. ‘His triumph rope grew long. He became the Slaughterer of Nations. The Eater of Cities, and then of Worlds, with us at his side. Some even dared to know him as “the Red Angel”.’

As if in response, the ship creaked and juddered. It was like a leviathan stirring in its sleep, drifting on the unseen currents of the aether beyond the shuttered viewports. Lotara rose unsteadily to her feet, sparing a concerned glance for the static-crazed oculus high overhead. She often felt that she did not know whether her once prized vessel was still ev–

Khârn whirled around, catching her in mid-step and making Tobin flinch. His face was contorted almost into the likeness of the Sarum-pattern helm he so favoured.

‘Those are not his names!’ he hissed, his eyes flashing in the dim light, and she could smell his rancid, unwashed transhuman stink. ‘None of them. My father’s name is Angron. That is all he has left.’

An awkwardly long moment passed between them. Khârn held the sleeve of Lotara’s dress tunic with one increasingly shaky hand, but she kept his gaze. Tobin continued to stare past them both, pretending he couldn’t see any of it.

Then the legionary’s eyes fell to the Red Hand emblazoned on her chest – the untidy print that he himself had made in honour of her exemplary service, what now felt like a lifetime ago. His resolve seemed to melt away, and he turned his back on her once more.

‘You should just drink it,’ he muttered. ‘You’ll hardly even notice the taste after a while.’

She made to smooth out the wrinkles in her uniform, but found that she couldn’t see any point. Instead, she picked up the canteen, unscrewed the top, and poured the contents out onto the deck.

‘I won’t do that, Khârn. You know I won’t do that.’

It was blood.

In some grim parody of the ancient Terran faiths, the Conqueror turned every drop of water they could reclaim into thick, sticky, slowly clotting blood.

The warriors of the Legion seemed content to gulp it down when they had no alternative – especially the primarch’s Devourers – though it heightened their manias, their rages and rivalries, and led to more deaths than usual in the fighting pits.

But it simply made the human crew sick. Of course it made them sick, even those most keen to impress their legionary masters. It was blood…

Was this what Angron wanted? It was impossible for anyone, even Khârn, to say.

Lotara’s gorge rose, and she realised she was becoming dizzy with the effort of standing. She let the canteen slip from her fingers, still gently shaking the tiny pillbox in her other hand, and trying to think of something to say about the separation between men and beasts. But the words simply wouldn’t come together in her foggy thoughts.

And that was when the warp rejected them.

Khârn evidently noticed something amiss in the split second before it happened, his head snapping around as he dropped into a reflexive, guarded crouch.

Then Lotara felt it – the dislocating reverse-yawn of an unexpected warp translation, the instant drawn out into eternity but crushed back to an instant against its will, the cold slither of the warp retreating from the hull, Geller fields straining with the almost infinite deceleration between the immaterium and reality…

The deck lurched. Sirens and alarms sounded. Lotara reeled, but kept her footing even in the slick of spilled blood. The older Tobin was not so nimble, and their skulls cracked together as he tripped over the corner of the dais. She fell, bright motes swimming at the corners of her vision, letting out a pained gasp an instant before her shoulder hit the metal-plated floor.

To their credit, and dazed as they were, the helm officers managed to bring the slewing motion of the stricken Conqueror under control as it tumbled back into real space.

His combat reflexes still heightened, Khârn glanced down at her.

He cocked his head. ‘What–’

Another vessel, perhaps the escort frigate Metzgerei, slammed into the flagship’s aft quarter.

The Conqueror howled in pain.

Khârn was hurled from his feet by the impact. Lotara saw him collide head first with the standing crystalflex pane of a fighter-patrol tactical display, shattering it instantly. Tobin went skidding in the same direction across the deck, and tumbled down into the starboard sensorium bay.

The lumens blinked out across the bridge. The acrid stench of an unseen electrical fire quickly filled the air. Servitors spewed garbled half-words, their machine brains moving a few milliseconds faster than their augmitters could manage. Someone was screaming. A secondary explosion rocked the hull, probably a detonation in one of the lesser magazines.

Decompression warning beacons strobed in the enclosed space. The ship’s superstructure groaned as it shrugged off the collision and limped clear of the growing debris field.

Lotara’s ears were ringing. She couldn’t tell where the deck alarms ended and her tinnitus began but, thankfully enough, it was drowning out the screams. Rolling onto all fours, smearing her uniform red in the process, she managed to scan the space around the command throne.

Her mouth fell open.

It was Khârn. He was on his knees.

He was screaming.

With one hand the captain clutched at the ruin of his face; it was little more than a wet, crimson flap hanging from his left eye socket to the open slash of his mouth. Teeth, gums and cheekbone glinted back from the bloody mess, under the bridge’s emergency lighting.

With the other hand, he gripped what was left of Ivar Tobin by the neck.

In his insensible agony, Khârn had torn the man apart.

They called my father the Lord of the Red Sands. For a time, they loved him.

He was the Undefeated. His triumph rope grew long. He became the Slaughterer of Nations. The Eater of Cities, and then of Worlds, with us at his side. Some even dared to know him as ‘the Red Angel’…

But those are not his names. None of them. He was little more than a slave who became a butcher, but a butcher who was crowned a primarch, and a primarch who was turned into a monster.

In spite of it all, we loved him too. For a time.

My father’s name is Angron. In these increasingly rare moments of clarity, between the blood-rages and the infinities of pain that seem to burn his skull from the inside out, the name of Angron is all that he has left. That and nothing more, for I suspect he no longer recognises the creature he sees reflected in the pools of spilled blood around the creaking, shifting throne that we built for him.

We have only his pious, self-righteous brother Lorgar to thank for that.

And one day, we will.

Blood. Drink it down. The taste is…

Once Terra has burned and the Warmaster’s claim to the Throne proven just, the XII Legion will festoon the new Imperium with the skulls of Lorgar’s sons, the treacherous Word Bearers. We will kill them, maim them, and burn what remains. Perhaps then, our father can find some small measure of peace to carry him through eternity.

Am I like him? Do we walk the same path?

Maybe. I know that I am marked by… something.

Its eye is upon me, the same sleepless and unwavering eye that has watched my father all his life, no doubt. I can feel its malignant glare, burning unseen in the heavens with the intensity of a supernova, the eightfold heat washing through the base of my skull, prickling the flesh between my shoulders whenever I rest, the echoes of its half-remembered name ringing inside of my skull.

It watches everything. It sees all that I am, and everything I can never be.

Khârn. Khârn. Khârn. Betrayed.

Kill them. Maim them.

Would that I were judged for my atrocities. I could answer to those in a heartbeat, and spit upon any who would say that a legionary’s rightful role is not that of an attack dog.

Rather, I know that I am to be condemned for whatever vestige of mercy and sane thought I can still muster, when the killing is done and the Butcher’s Nails are sated. Such things as ‘mercy’ and ‘sanity’ are of no interest to whatever it is that lurks beyond.

And peace for my father’s soul is not something that concerns it one bit.

Burn them. Burn them.

The darkness retreats. The brain-fire cools. What–

Blood.

Blood, and pain, and nothing more.

Click here to buy The Horus Heresy: Traitorous Scions.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

‘Prince of Blood’ first published in Sons of the Emperor: An Anthology in 2018
‘Child of Chaos’ first published in Black Library Events Anthology 2018/2019 in 2018
‘Grandfather’s Gift’ first published in 2017
‘Lantern’s Light’ first published in Black Library Celebration 2019 in 2019
‘Lupus Daemonis’ first published in Blood of the Emperor: An Anthology in 2021
‘The Sixth Cult of the Denied’ first published in Blood of the Emperor: An Anthology in 2021
‘Council of Truth’ first published in Blood of the Emperor: An Anthology in 2021
‘Terminus’ first published in Blood of the Emperor: An Anthology in 2021
‘The Abyssal Edge’ first published in Sons of the Emperor: An Anthology in 2018
‘The Emperor’s Architect’ first published in Sons of the Emperor: An Anthology in 2018
‘The Ancient Awaits’ first published in Sons of the Emperor: An Anthology in 2018
‘Misbegotten’ first published in Sons of the Emperor: An Anthology in 2018
‘The Verdict of the Scythe’ first published in Scions of the Emperor: An Anthology in 2019
‘The Conqueror’s Truth’ first published in Scions of the Emperor: An Anthology in 2019
This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Represented by: Games Workshop Limited – Irish branch, Unit 3, Lower Liffey Street, Dublin 1,D01 K199, Ireland.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

The Horus Heresy: Traitorous Scions © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2021. The Horus Heresy: Traitorous Scions, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-80407-137-3

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

See Black Library on the internet at
blacklibrary.com

Find out more about Games Workshop’s world of Warhammer and the Warhammer 40,000 universe at
games-workshop.com

eBook license

This license is made between:

Games Workshop Limited t/a Black Library, Willow Road, Lenton, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, United Kingdom (“Black Library”); and

the purchaser of a Black Library e-book product (“You/you/Your/your”)

(jointly, “the parties”)

These are the terms and conditions that apply when you purchase a Black Library e-book (“e-book”). The parties agree that in consideration of the fee paid by you, Black Library grants you a license to use the e-book on the following terms:

* 1. Black Library grants to you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, royalty-free license to use the e-book in the following ways:

o 1.1 to store the e-book on any number of electronic devices and/or storage media (including, by way of example only, personal computers, e-book readers, mobile phones, portable hard drives, USB flash drives, CDs or DVDs) which are personally owned by you;

o 1.2 to access the e-book using an appropriate electronic device and/or through any appropriate storage media.

* 2. For the avoidance of doubt, you are ONLY licensed to use the e-book as described in paragraph 1 above. You may NOT use or store the e-book in any other way. If you do, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license.

* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.